"We're secure for the time being," he said.
Ariel nodded toward his desk. "Smart matrix?"
"An old one."
"Your desk is an AI. "
"Was. Rega would never allow one on his property."
"I don't understand. If you're willing to use one, how do you?"
"Life is a compromise. I prefer working for Rega to working for anyone else. That doesn't mean I agree with everything he says or believes." He smiled thinly. "Much like you, I imagine. "
"Ah, well. To coin a phrase, 'That's different:"
"Really. Well, I won't argue. How are you feeling?"
"Better," she said, raising the empty glass.
"Want another one?"
"Yes, but later. Too much comfort dulls the reflexes. How are you?"
Coren shook his head.
"Let me see your shoulder," Ariel said. She reached for his shirt.
Coren leaned away from her. "I'm all right."
"Of course you are. Let me see."
With obvious reluctance, Coren unzipped his shirt and pulled the left half away, revealing his shoulder. Ugly bruising spread from the base of his neck down to his clavicle.
"Have you seen a doctor?" she asked.
"In my spare time," he said grumpily and pulled the shirt back on. "Painblock."
"You'll pay for that."
"I know." He shrugged. "I made an appointment, but…"
He went to a sofa and sat down heavily, letting his head fall back.
"Your desk," Ariel said. "What happened?"
"Something got through my buffers," he said. "I had the AI doing a lot of in-depth searches. It was spread fairly thin and it must've become vulnerable."
"Or some of the files it was accessing were corrupted."
"Sleeper programs?"
"Maybe. If I could look at the software I could tell you. But bringing it here-"
"-would corrupt this system. Unless we knew exactly what had gotten through."
"Go to the head of the class."
Coren rubbed his shoulder, frowning. "This…cyborg. He's the one who rolled me in Petrabor."
"You're certain?"
"I think I'd remember a deathgrip like that." He frowned at her. "Unless there's more than one?"
"No," Ariel said suddenly, hoping it was true. "Let's not get more paranoid than we need to. "
"You said it was a cyborg."
"I was guessing. I could be wrong-"
"But if you're not, what is it you're talking about?"
"A composite. An organic machine."
"I've seen some pretty impressive soldiers come out of-"
Ariel shook her head. "No, this different. I've seen those people, too, and they aren't like this."
"You said an organic machine. Like augmentation? Prostheses?"
"Far more intimately involved than that. Yes, you could claim that people with artificial limbs, organs, new skin, bone replacements are cyborgs, but it's a much too limited use of the term. No, people like that are still fundamentally human-there's a clear line of separation between the organic and the augmentation. You haven't replaced their basic being with a full-partner robotic symbiote. A cyborg is a blend of the two into a third kind of being. "
"I don't quite follow."
"Neither did we. That's why we stopped fooling with them."
Coren scowled skeptically. "I thought Aurorans were the experts on robotic intelligence."
Ariel sat forward. "We are. That's what I mean. This isn't robotic intelligence. It's…something else. And we couldn't figure out what."
His disdain faded to a guarded respect. Ariel sat back, mollified.
"All right," he said. "I'm listening."
"A positronic brain," Ariel said, "is basically a sensory-data receiver-collator that operates by a collection of discrete parameters arranged in constellations that shift in response to new data. That's a gross simplification, but accurate enough for our purposes. We're talking about a few billion discrete parameters and nanosecond processing time, and a complete lack of an unconscious, and a few other additions and subtractions that allow us to actually program it while granting it a modicum of creative responses-"
Coren held up his hand. "I get the idea. I think. But that sounds like any other AI system."
"True. The key defining factor is in self-perception. A positronic brain is aware of itself. It is also aware of others as both distinct and collective entities that possess similar attributes. "
"But-"
"I'm using the word 'aware' in exactly the way you would use it to describe yourself. An AI, no matter how sophisticated, is not aware. The best of them have fully-mapped models of their own make-up and function: a reference, if you will, that tells them what they are. But the relationship is always and only one of data referencing data in a strict modular process. A positronic brain possesses a sense of Self that is independent of models-it will continue to perceive itself as a Self even with extensive reprogramming that might in any other respect change the nature of what it does and what it knows-and a basic understanding of Self in others. That opens a huge gulf between an AI and a positronic brain. For instance, you could never infiltrate a positronic brain the way your desk was infiltrated. An AI, unless specifically commanded, will regard that infiltration as a problem in programming. It's just data. The more sophisticated the infiltration, the less likely it is to be aware of anything wrong. A positronic brain would immediately detect the attempt not as data but as damage. It would respond to it by treating it more or less as an infection. It would feel wrong. And if the infiltration were inimical to its loyalties, then the Three Laws would come into play. If it could not purge the infiltration, it would collapse. It would not tolerate a violation of its Self."
"Humans don't even do that, " Coren said.
"Not as effectively, no," Ariel agreed. "But we have far fewer hardwired parameters and far more self-reprogramming parameters. We have both a sub- and an un-conscious. We can dream, we can imagine, we can lie, we can hallucinate. Reality is a conditional set of perceptions. The plasticity of our minds enables us to function even through gross distortions in our initial parameters. We imagine more richly and much faster than we process information. We're inextricably linked to our environment, but our perceptions of our environment are fluid. We can be fooled, deceived, manipulated. But it's a two-way exchange-the manipulator will be manipulated in turn through the interaction-but we can still function in the midst of deception and illusion. We can set aside our moral restrictions if need be-and we define our own need-and resume them later. If we choose. Humans, in short, can remake who they are at will. A positronic brain cannot."
Coren's face showed the effort to understand. Ariel stopped, unsure how much he followed.
"It borders on metaphysics," he said.
" 'Borders?' Hell, it is metaphysics. All the philosophical speculation of ten thousand years became concrete when the first positronic robot sat up and said hello to its makers."
Coren nodded slowly. "And a cyborg?"
Ariel sighed. "Positronic intelligence gave us another self aware entity we could compare our own to and ask questions about the differences. It gave us the measuring stick to determine what is human and what is not. Cyborgs…break the measuring sticks and dump all those questions back in our laps."
She leaned forward again. "Imagine a positronic brain with all its capacity to analyze data and perceive the world as a material whole all at once, joined to something that can set its own parameters. There is no buffer, no unconscious to help process excess data or unpalatable information, and no preset responses to conditions. It has no basis for behavior other than what it chooses to have at any given moment. "
"You've described a sociopath."
"A very, very fast, smart sociopath. A sociopath we can't begin to understand because we don't have a model for its mental processes."